Thursday, May 24, 2012

In 2009 the Library of Congress’ Policy and Standards Division (PSD) and LC’s Geography and Maps Division (G&M) began a project to develop genre/form terms for cartographic materials. In 2010 approximately 60 terms were approved for use and implemented. However, an important issue has not yet been resolved: What is the appropriate genre/form treatment for globes?

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Policy and Standards Division of the Library of Congress has received a revision proposal for the Belarusian ALA-LC romanization table from the ACRL Slavic and East European Section Committee on Automated Bibliographic Control. The proposal aims to bring the Belarusian ALA-LC romanization table in accordance with the modern standard Belarusian language, and also to support an expansion of the table by the inclusion of letters that are considered obsolete but which nonetheless occur in older Belarusian publications.

This report describes the crosswalk developed at OCLC for mapping the bibliographic elements defined in Version 3.0 of ONIX for Books to MARC 21 with AACR2 encoding. It is an update to the previous report, Mapping ONIX to MARC, which was published in 2010 and focused on ONIX 2.1.

Written by Senior Research Scientist Carol Jean Godby, A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21 describes the layout of the crosswalk and a strategy for deriving ONIX 3.0 syntax from ONIX 2.1, including a note about how the translation logic is implemented at OCLC. It also builds a complex MARC record from ONIX 3.0 input, focusing on relationships that constitute an important source of shared value in the library and publisher communities, are newly introduced or extensively revised in ONIX 3.0, or illustrate unresolved conceptual problems with bibliographic description. In the process of creating this record, it becomes apparent that some of the concepts introduced in ONIX 3.0 are not easily expressed in a MARC record with AACR2 semantics. The report concludes by speculating about how the MARC output might be improved if the AACR2 semantics is replaced by RDA.

For a quick overview, watch the YouTube video of Carol Jean Godby summarizing the report. For more information about the work related to the report, see the Metadata Schema Transformation Services activity page on the OCLC Research website (links below).